Art in CONTEXT

The image of the role of women during the Civil War that Americans currently carry has derived from Hollywood spectacles of the event. However, as historians are beginning to rediscover, the place of women during the war was as central as in later wars. Ranging from maintaining the home front and the business sector to organizing large fund-raising activities, such as the Sanitary Fairs, to support the efforts, women were as important to the sustaining of the culture as their fighting fathers, brothers, or husbands.

Instead of focusing on the positive accomplishments of these women in Civil War Widow, Charles Soule, Jr. illustrates another truth of the war between the states. For subjects like Soule's, the aftermath of the war meant a different place within a patriarchal society. Widows often became wards of their families or of the state, and significantly, following the war, the very men they had aided usually forced these women out of the businesses they had helped to maintain. What fate awaits this widow remains uncertain. Grieving and mourning found their place among American visual representation during the latter part of the 19th century, often appearing as mass-produced prints, book illustrations, and images in gift books and other moralistic texts.

The son of the Dayton portraitist Charles Soule, Sr., Charles Jr. began his career like others as a carriage and sign painter and by 1858 was listed in the Dayton business directory as a portrait painter. He, like his father, traveled throughout the region as an itinerant artist. While the emotional impetus for the painting is not yet known, its visual prototype is known. Soule based this painting on a work titled Evangeline by the Scottish artist, Thomas Faed. Evangeline derives from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1847 poem of the same title. Set in Acadie (present-day Nova Scotia), Longfellow's eponymous heroine spent her life searching for her lover Gabriel who was seized and deported by the British during their colonization. As a standard image for mourning and female loss Faed's work was widely distributed in the United States through prints, photographs, and postcards. It is, no doubt, through one of these examples that Soule saw and later copied (with only the slightest rearranging) the image.

Todd D. Smith

SUGGESTED READING:

Maher, Kathleen. Heroes of the Home Front: Life North of the Battlefield, exhibition catalogue, The Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum, Norwalk, CT., 1995.

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